On the Wards
by Dunnage41
Summary: While Abe is in Vietnam, Henry volunteers for his own personal hell.
1. Chapter 1

It took less than twenty minutes for Dr. Henry Morgan to become sick to his stomach.

He pushed open the heavy, scarred metal door to the stairwell. Without even taking the time to find the key, unlock the door to the toilets, and get to a sink, he vomited into a trash can that happened to be resting in the corner. Trash cans in corners were a rare amenity.

He heaved copiously, returning to the elements the good breakfast Abigail had made for him as well as the lunch she had packed. Finally he vomited up traces of yellowing bile and, at last, his ribs aching, he heaved dryly for another minute or longer.

The Veterans Administration Hospital in the Bronx, New York, was hell. And he should know. His long and cursed life had ushered him into the underworld on more than one occasion: Charing Cross Asylum and its dreadful "hydrotherapy." The madness of Nora, fifty years on. The tenement slums of New York City and the stinking inferno of Whitechapel where Jack the Ripper plied his horrendous trade.

But this – this was a _hospital_. A place of healing. At the thought, his stomach heaved again, even though there was nothing left to emit.

He straightened up painfully, took several deep breaths, wincing. As the sweat cooled on his face, he straightened his necktie with trembling hands and reluctantly pushed the door open.

"Excuse me. I'm sorry," he said automatically. Opening the door had brushed it against someone. He looked again. A priest, a man of about fifty, his own height, dressed in clericals.

The man smiled warmly, then looked closer.

"Come with me," he said. The gentle tone and light touch of the man's hand on Henry's elbow made it sound more like a tempting invitation than an order.

They found a lounge and sank into hard plastic molded chairs.

"I'm Charlie Watters," he said, extending a hand.*

"Henry Morgan."

"A doctor," Watters said.

"Yes."

Watters smiled. He let the silence knit between them, allowing quiet to begin to mend around the edges of Henry's soul – though that element would be forever scarred by what he had seen. And this was only his first day. He had another three hundred sixty-four of these to get through. God. He shuddered.

"First day?" Watters asked.

"Yes. My –" He almost put his foot in it and said, _My son is over there_. "My, uh … father was in the World War, but the care afterward was nothing like this." He shook his head. "During World War Two, there were close to fifty thousand army nurses. Now it's a tenth of that."

Watters shook his head. "Where was your dad?"

"Sixty-third Infantry. Europe. With the 7th along the Rhine." He held his breath.

"I was in the 43rd. 'Winged Victory.' Guadalcanal." Both men were silent for a moment, for different reasons.

"That gave me a bellyful," Watters offered. "It was after that that I took advantage of the G.I. Bill. Went to seminary. Decided that I should "never learn war any more."

They smiled. Henry sighed.

"So… what made you dive into hell?"

Henry's lips twitched. "I read the papers. I see Walter Cronkite. And I know it must be a fraction of an angle of the truth. It's dreadful. I had to do something."

Watters nodded.

"What about you?" Henry ventured. "Why are you here, instead of…"

"Instead of a lovely white clapboard church in Syosset or Pound Ridge?" Watters smiled, his eyes crinkling. "Same reason. It would make me sick to stand comfortably in the pulpit each week and preach prophecy and gospel truth to spoon-fed suburbanites who are mostly removed from the reality of the situation. I asked the bishop to send me to a poor neighborhood, one where parents actually have sons over there, thought about joining up as a chaplain to be the one who delivers death notices, but they actually send chaplains over there. Classmate of mine got killed at Dak To. Besides, I'm too old. I'm forty-nine."

"Well, this – this is unimaginable," Henry said. "Men lying in their own filth – I round in the morning and again in the afternoon, and they have been lying in their own filth the whole time.

"Rats running free, nibbling on the waste and the wounds. And the few nurses who are here – they take their anti-war feelings out on the patients. And the paperwork is appalling."

Watters nodded. "We've send the flower of our youth, as good old LBJ says, into hell thirteen thousand miles away. The best and the brightest – have you read Halberstam? – have sent our best and brightest into a death pit.

"You see, it's like this," Watters continued. "The boys who go off – they're young, their dads have grown up believing that war is noble and brave and true and that serving their country is the obligation of every red-blooded American … and the boys, they're going because they got a draft notice, and they don't have the money or the connections to go to Canada, or college, or become a teacher, or have a doctor fake them out, or … well, a few of them might actually believe it's the right thing to do.

"Now boys my age – I was over there for several years, but I added it up; less than half a year of that was in actual combat. And when we weren't in combat, we were safe. We knew where the front lines were, and we weren't there.

"Vietnam? Not only are there no front lines, there are no identifiable enemies. A six-year-old kid could be concealing a pineapple. The next step could land you on a mine or a trap.

"And I'll tell you what else: we got out? It took us six months or longer of peace and quiet before we could get a berth home, and the trip over took a few weeks. I see men here, now. They tell me: 'One day I'm in Pleiku – forty-eight hours later I'm in bed beside my wife, and she wonders why I'm twitchy!' Too fast, too abrupt, no debriefing. Would it kill them to ship guys home by way of Germany and give them a week or two at Landstuhl?"

He shook his head. "They get yanked off the streets, they get a bare minimum of training, they spend their days walking point, burning villages, napalm. Then six or seven months later they're a 'one-digit midget,' they're on a commercial flight home, guys are spitting on them in the airport as the remains of their bodies are pushed to us in a wheelchair, and they've got a huge heroin habit – which the lovely and talented VA helps them with by letting them detox while they're chained down so they don't claw their arms to the bone." He sighed.

"Sorry," he said ruefully. "I've become cynical. It's not healthy."

"How can anything be healthy?" Henry said. A pause. "What do you…"

"What do I do for them?" Watters sighed again. "What I can. Listen, mostly. Let them be angry at me. Some of them actually come to the services I hold each week."  
 _To be continued._

 _*Charlie Watters was an actual U.S. Army Chaplain. He was killed in the Battle of Dak To while assisting wounded men._


	2. Chapter 2

The third-shift orderlies were almost certainly checking their watches and counting the ten or twelve minutes left in their shift. Dr. Henry Morgan could see a few first-shift orderlies shuffling toward the employee entrance. The time was 6:49 a.m. One shift was ending and another beginning. The shift change doubtless meant little or nothing to the men in the beds, in the wards.

The old ones, those who had fought in the First World War or even the Spanish-American War – they were for the most part in a perpetual twilight haze, medicated to within inches of death and seldom caring. They were the ones who were in their seventies, eighties, or nineties. One was 103, Corporal Raymond Arthur Woods. He had served seven months overseas in 1896 and still, eighty years later, refused to respond to anyone unless addressed as "Corporal Woods." It was painful to watch him salute, which he attempted after every interaction. It generally took a full six or eight seconds for him to raise his arm to within hailing distance of his forehead.

There were a few veterans from World War Two and Korea – those missing two or more limbs, or blinded, or whose faces were so hideously scarred that the dimly lighted purgatory of a VA ward was a kinder waiting room than the glare of everyday living. The drugs took the edge off for these men, and a chunk of reality, but cruelly left them enough sentience to know that they could continue existing for another ten or even thirty years before they were mercifully gathered home.

But these days, the vast majority of beds were filled with veterans of the current war: Vietnam. The New York Times had, somewhere along the way, decided that it was one word instead of two. Henry had probably, vaguely, noted the change at the time, but it mattered so little that the thought had likely swum through his brain and drained away into nothingness.

He shook his head. His steps had taken him where he had needed to go, answering a summons: in one of the horrendous inner wards stuffed into the center of the building so that no windows and no possibility of light, clouds, air, sunshine, or gently falling leaves could brighten, by even a fraction, the perpetual gloom of these men. For this brief moment, Henry thought bitterly, this nameless, faceless veteran was important. He was being attended by two nurses; two orderlies hovered silently nearby. The chaplain, Charlie Watters, stood at the foot of the bed, prayer beads dangling from his long fingers. And his own arrival completed the tableau. Title the painting "The Dying Warrior," Henry thought dryly. And add a few lamps to lighten the gloom.

Watters, who was slightly better than average height, looked taller in his black clericals. In the semidarkness the silver cross resting just above his black coat buttons was an interruption in the dull darkness of his clothing: nothing more.

"Any minute now, Dr. Morgan," he said, the words quiet yet unforced.

They waited in silence. The silence became heavy, almost vocal. Henry's eyes were pinned to the form in the bed, his full attention on capturing each agonizingly shallow breath. A very slight nod to one of the nurses, and she smoothly lifted a wrist and captured it between fingers and thumb, and somehow the silence changed in the waiting. She studied her large nurse's wristwatch.

"Twenty-six," she finally said, and it sounded loud in the room. Twenty-six. That was the cost of a whipcord suit, or the check from a dinner for four. It was not a pulse – at any rate, not a pulse that anyone would claim. Pulse rates, when announced into the silence, should be "eighty-four," or "seventy-three."

"Twenty-one," she corrected a moment later. A very nice Cabernet; a winter coat; a sunburst clock. A center-dent fedora and a pair of wing tip shoes.

"Doctor."

That was the next sound in the room, and it came from the other nurse.

" _Doctor_." In one stride, Henry was at the head of the bed. Stethoscope up, earpieces in, sensitive fingers holding the tubing. Henry had rarely heard respiration so shallow.

"Sixteen." A three-light pole lamp he had seen advertised in a magazine recently.

Through the earpieces, Henry strained, eyes closed, desperate to hear something. Without meaning to, he shook his head.

"Call," said one of the nurses. She looked at her watch. "Seven-seventeen," she said, articulating with care.

"Time of death, seven-seventeen a.m.," Henry said. Behind him, Watters murmured what sounded like a prayer. Henry was conscious of the baritone voice rising and falling but could not make out actual words.

An hour later, they were sitting in what was euphemistically called a Family Lounge on the fifth floor. Two scuffed and hazy Plexiglas floor-to-ceiling windows formed a corner, a welcome break in the cinderblock-and-brick building; and the room looked out on what was even more euphemistically termed a courtyard. Translation: a bare, bleak rectangle of packed earth and a few scrawny, dying shrubs, in whose corners sat a couple of metal-lattice tables and mismatched metal-and-webbing chairs. Little piles of cigarette butts and a few cigar mouthpieces littered the corners.

Watters was brooding over a cup of foully old coffee, occasionally taking a sip and managing not to grimace openly. He had cut it with powdered creamer, for what the effort was worth. Henry, who was a snob about coffee in a way someone can be only when he has been enjoying it for one hundred fifty years, was only with great effort keeping his hands from fidgeting. Watters finally put the Styrofoam cup aside and pulled out a pack of Camels.

"Smoke?" He held the pack toward Henry, who took it gratefully and shook out two cigarettes. Retaining one, he gave the other and the pack back to the chaplain.

"I shouldn't," they said in unison, and both smiled. Watters coughed dryly, then produced a book of matches. They lit up.

"I've been reading that it's bad for you," Watters said ruefully. "And it can't be good to be coating my lungs with this stuff. But damn me if I don't need one in the worst way."

Henry inhaled greedily. He knew perfectly well that smoking was a bad habit. He also knew that lung cancer, should he contract it, wouldn't kill him, and he reveled in the rarely used safety valve of the immortal.

Henry cleared his throat. "Ha—h'm. As a … as a chaplain … do you …"

"Don't I get used to it?"

"Well – _yes_."

"No." The word was surprisingly weighted for one so small. Henry felt it cut the air. The chaplain seemingly did too, for he disarmed the scene with one of his self-deprecating smiles. The laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his blue eyes. He sighed.

"No is the short answer." This struck them both as disproportionately funny and they laughed together for nearly half a minute.

"What I mean is – you do and you don't. It happens enough so that I _ought to_. And so on one level, I do. On the other hand, you never get used to a combat death. And that's what some of these are. Now Corporal Woods, age a hundred and three or whatever, when he closes his eyes for the last time it'll be a frigging relief. But when someone who is all of twenty-four years old with a monkey on his back the size of King Kong, courtesy of Uncle Sam … when he's got a pulse rate that sounds like the price of a suit" – Henry jumped; he had had that exact thought in the room earlier – "to me, the death certificate should read, "Killed in Action."

Watters sucked in another mouthful of smoke. "When one of our brave boys in uniform is actually killed in action, he's classed a hero. His mom or wife gets a triangular folded flag, and everyone can rest well at night knowing that their boy died a hero's death, whatever that means, in Da Trang or in the suburbs along the Ho Chi Minh trail or wherever.

"But," another puff, "but. When our brave boy actually survives that Gehenna* and comes back to the States to be shipped directly to our happy little summer camp here, where he lies in his own urine and beats off the rats eating his poop, guess what? When he dies here, he's not a hero. Not in the eyes of the government, not to Uncle Walter** and not to his family. To die in the hospital is embarrassing, a disgrace. It's hushed up."

He exhaled twin plumes of smoke from his nostrils. "I used to visit 'em, you know."

"Visit…" Henry raised his eyebrows.

"The families. Of the deceased. That lasted about six months."

"What happened?"

"A girl of about eighteen answered the door. She was six or seven months along and had blond hair down to the bottom of one of those skirts you used to get arrested for wearing in public until what's her name – Twiggy – started showing up in them. Anyway, she might have been all of twenty-one but I doubt it. She looked about fourteen.

"She's got eyes like in those paintings, you know, great big eyes that look like pools of black velvet. White lipstick. She takes one look at me in my uniform – ha – and she says, 'I know.' Then she corrects herself. 'I know, Father. I mean, I know, Sir.' She steps back and says, 'Come in.'

She sits down on a little vinyl loveseat and points me to the hand-me-down wing chair. 'The military already sent somebody,' she says. 'I think he was a priest too.'

"'I'm a chaplain, from the VA,' I say, and I sit down. You can tell it's taking everything she has to keep herself together. I'm almost afraid to say anything else. Then she leans forward." Watters swallowed hard. He lit another cigarette and reflexively offered the pack to Henry, who shook his head.

"She leans forward and she says, 'I was a philosophy major at Fordham.'"

Henry's eyes widened.

"I know, right? Turns out she's one of those wiz kids who graduated from high school at sixteen. She'd already had a year of college in her before she got whoopsied and they had to say I-do in front of a JP in Maryland. Anyway, she says, 'I was a philosophy major at Fordham. And the military priest told me that Carl is guaranteed to be in heaven even as we speak because he died in service to his country. Now can you tell me, Father, how that is even remotely possible?'

And she sits back, and she winces and grabs her belly, and then she waits, calm as a Buddhist, for me to say something.

"I'm so pole-axed at this point I say the first thing out of my mouth, no filter at all. 'No,' I say, 'No ma'am, I can't. I can't promise you anything.'

And with no sound, and no warning, her eyes brim up and tears just run down her cheeks like taps turned on. She doesn't hunch over, doesn't close her eyes, _nothing_ – just like a stone statue with water running the way they do.

And without saying a word, I stand up, and I help her up, and she grabs my hand and pumps it, once, a handshake, sort of, and she turns away, and I turn away, and I take three steps and I'm at the door, and out I go, and I turn and head toward the train station to get back to the city. That was in Dobbs Ferry." Watters stood and stretched, grunting a little and kneading his fists into the small of his back.

"That's twice now we've conversed, Dr. Morgan," Watters said, "and I'm still the only one doing all the talking. We'll have to do something about that next time we chat." And he gave an oddly formal nod, and walked away.

 _*Gehenna: The name for the garbage dump outside first-century cities in the Middle East. In the Bible, a synonym for hell._

** _Uncle Walter: Nickname for American newscaster Walter Cronkite, who anchored the CBS Evening News for several decades._


End file.
